As this slowly contracted, Neptune was detached, first perhaps as a ring, and then as a spherical body. Ages after this Uranus broke away.
Then after another incalculable period Saturn followed suit, and here the tendencies to coherence and disruption were so evenly balanced that to this day a portion circulates as rings round the main body instead of being broken up into satellites. Again after successive intervals Jupiter, Mars, the Asteroids, the Earth, Venus, and Mercury all passed through the same marvellous phases. The time which these changes would have required must have been incalculable, and they all of course preceded, and preceded again by another incalculable period, the very commencement of that geological history which itself indicates a lapse of time greater than human imagination can realise.
Thus, then, however far we penetrate in time or in space, we find ourselves surrounded by mystery. Just as in time we can form no idea of a commencement, no anticipation of an end, so space also extends around us, boundless in all directions. Our little Earth revolves round the mighty Sun; the Sun itself and the whole solar system are moving with inconceivable velocity towards a point in the constellation of Hercules; together with all the nearer stars it forms a cluster in the heavens, which appears to our eyes as the Milky Way; while outside our star cluster again are innumerable others, which far transcend, alike in magnitude, in grandeur, and in distance, the feeble powers of our finite imagination.
FOOTNOTES:
[66] Ball, Story of the Heavens.
[67] Ball, Story of the Heavens.
[68] Some authorities estimate it even higher.
[69] Ball.
[70] Hamerton, Landscape.
[71] Humboldt, Travels.